Please stop reading now if you cannot stand having key moments from your favorite stories revealed to you before they happen. Do not peruse this post if you are one of those people who put your fingers in your ears when your friends start waxing rhapsodic about the season finale of Dexter while you are still only midway through Season 2 on Netflix streaming. Should you be the sort who would come to blows with someone who blurts out the winner of the big game while you are watching it on TiVo trying to recreate the experience of seeing it live, you must refrain this instant from reading any further.
Because I am about to reveal a spoiler that has been kept under a very tight lid for quite some time. And this is it: we die in the end.
I know, I know, it's disappointing to be just getting into something you really like and then learn how it comes out. It's as if all the excitement you have put into watching the show of your life has fizzled, and you can barely muster the energy you need to slog through the rest of the episodes.
And the thing was, it was pretty enjoyable up to now, too. Maybe you had to get through the first season to really appreciate what it was all about, but after that you were hooked and you couldn't wait to keep on seeing what kind of plot twists you were going to experience next; what kind of interesting people were going to go in and out of the story while you watched. Maybe you would sleep with some of them, even. Or at the very least go camping.
So, I'm sorry to come along and kill all the suspense that was keeping you invested in letting it all unfold, but when I got the breaking news from my inside sources I couldn't very well sit on the biggest scoop of the century: that we're all here doing what we're doing and then at some point we're just not.
But, it's okay. The fact is, the really, really amazing TV shows and movies are ones that we can watch over and over again. We keep coming back to them to recapture the good feeling they gave us before. Sometimes we watch them even after someone has screwed things up with a spoiler, just to see why everyone says they are so great. You can take either of these approaches to life, even though you have just found out that it ends rather badly.
So don't freak out. Just live your life and do the best you can to enjoy it, until that day when someone comes in to find you in front of the DVD player, now long past caring that the menu music has been repeating on a thirty-second loop for the past nine days.
James Napoli is an author and humorist. More of his comedy content for the web can be found here.